Do Plants Know Math: Unwinding the Story of Plant Spirals, from Leonardo da Vinci to Now, a Review

NB. I was sent this book as a review copy.

From Princeton University Press

Take a pinecone and look at it from above. You will find that there are two ways of following the spirals on the pinecone:

Count the number of each spiral color, and most often, these numbers will correspond to Fibonacci numbers. This spiral formation pattern, known as parastichy, repeats widely across the botanical world and remained beyond human understanding for millennia.

Though not structured as such, this book feels like a mystery novel, in a way I hadn’t expected but thoroughly enjoyed. The story explores the appearance of Fibonacci numbers in the patterns of many plants, raising the question of how these numbers come about. The title, of course, hints that plants, in displaying mathematical structure, might seem to “know” math. The punchline arrives at the end, but the journey toward it is a beautiful exploration of research spanning the last two thousand years—from the first studies by the ancient Greeks on phyllotaxis (the arrangement of leaves on a plant stem), through China, Rome, India, Italy, and onward into the modern era, where complex systems science, genetics, information theory, computational modeling, and more bring us closer to understanding how spiral formations encode this mathematics.…